Review: Longlegs (2024)

Longlegs (2024)

Rated R for bloody violence, disturbing images and some language

Score: 5 out of 5

Yeah, Longlegs really is as good as you've heard. The marketing for this has been pitch-perfect, promising a terrifying murder mystery thriller without giving away much of the plot beyond Nicolas Cage playing a cryptic serial killer and Maika Monroe playing the FBI agent hunting him down, like a modern-day Silence of the Lambs except with the '90s setting making it a period piece instead of a contemporary story. It very much is that kind of film, except that one thing the trailers never really hinted at was the other big influence it takes from David Lynch, and specifically from Twin Peaks. It's a supernatural mindfuck of a movie that's less scary (though make no mistake, it is plenty scary) than it is deeply, deeply unsettling, the kind of murder mystery where the actual mystery and clues are perfunctory versus the experience of the hunt for the killer and the bizarre nature of his crimes, anchored by two great performances from Cage and Monroe and an outstanding construction of mood and atmosphere by writer/director Osgood Perkins. It's a movie that I'm sure movie nerds are gonna turn on in a few years given its rather straightforward plot beneath its twisted presentation and creative viral marketing, but watching it myself in a packed theater, I was left pretty shaken.

Our protagonist Lee Harker is a young FBI agent who's described as "highly inquisitive" by her boss Carter and is implied to be either genuinely psychic, as some of her colleagues seem to think, or autistic, as Maika Monroe's performance seems to tilt towards. (If you ask me, I'd say that there's elements of both at play.) While Nicolas Cage has been the focus of a lot of the attention this movie's gotten, he's actually not in it all that much, with it being Monroe's job to carry most of the film as its protagonist and central viewpoint character. And she knocked it out of the park. She makes Lee feel like a very off-kilter character, one who's hesitant to speak and terrible at spotting social cues even as she has an almost supernatural ability to notice clues and make connections that her colleagues miss. This is the kind of role that could've easily turned into a flat performance, a lesser actor coming off as simply an emotionless piece of cardboard, but Monroe instead makes Lee feel like somebody who's struggling to appear "normal" as others would understand it. She had to convey, say, feeling terrified as though she's quietly burning up inside and about to erupt, without once resting on sex appeal even though she is a bombshell in real life. I've been a fan of hers since It Follows, and I hope that this is the movie that finally gets her some more recognition as one of the best scream queens of her generation.

That being said, there's a reason why so much of the hype surrounding this film has focused on Cage. It probably won't surprise you to know that he's once again playing a larger-than-life character, a devil-worshipping serial killer who somehow finds a way to convince ordinary fathers to murder their families and themselves and leaves messages written in code like the Zodiac killer, heightened here by the gritty realism of the rest of the cast and setting making him stand out that much more. What sets the Longlegs killer apart from many other recent Cage roles, however, is the manner in which such a figure is played here not as comical or creepy-cool, but as flat-out terrifyingly insane. He's an unkempt figure who lives on the fringes of society, dresses in a manner that feels like a mix of an aging hippie and an old lady (Cage said that his own mother was an inspiration for the role), and weirds out everybody he encounters, not least of all Lee in their one big scene together. He doesn't get that many scenes in the film, but those scenes are enough to leave an impact that hangs over the rest of the film like a grim fog of sorts. Cage's career renaissance in the last few years, at first in roles that played to his hammy reputation and then increasingly playing around with it, has been wonderful, and I hope this movie's success gets more people to realize that Cage is still a great actor and not just "the really intense guy who shouts a lot."

And through it all, behind the camera, Osgood Perkins' work as both writer and director is fantastic. This is the first film of his that I've seen, and it makes me want to go back through the rest of his filmography. He captures an exceptionally gloomy portrait of small-town Oregon that takes a stripped-down, grounded, realistic approach to such a point that it loops back around into a feeling that something is simply wrong in this place, like a real, lived-in location where nothing interesting really happens that just so happens to have a serial killer running around. It meshes perfectly with his screenplay, telling the kind of mystery where the clues don't really matter because we already know who the killer is from the moment Cage's mug first appears on screen, the real question being if Lee is going to stop him before he kills again. What's more, it helps to set up the slowly growing implication, which by the end you can't even call an implication anymore, that the Longlegs killer isn't just a mundane serial killer but actually has some kind of supernatural component to his crimes, and that his worship of Satan isn't just a weird quirk about him to make him more evil. Perkins' direction serves the idea that the Longlegs killer is just somebody who should not be, an inhuman force rampaging through our ordinary world. Add on a stellar supporting cast, including Blair Underwood as Lee's boss Carter who seems to have a target on his head the moment we meet his wife and his soon-to-be-birthday-girl daughter, Kiernan Shipka in a one-scene-wonder part as the one person who's survived the Longlegs killer and lived to tell about it (even if she's kind of... not all there anymore), and Alicia Witt as Lee's mother in a part I can barely even really talk about except to say that it's appropriate she was cast given her connection to Twin Peaks, and you have a movie that's simply the complete package.

The Bottom Line

This is the kind of review where trying to write it without giving too much away was a challenge. I'm just gonna stop here and tell you to go see this if you wanna check out an offbeat and chilling serial killer flick of the kind you always hear they don't make like they used to.